Diana
by The Die Hard
Summary: Princess Diana visits Smallville. Mayhem ensues, of course. Though not nearly so much as you might suspect.


Diana

This is what happens when you're cleaning out the refrigerator and eat stuff way past its expiration date.

A/N: I hate those caves so much (they're not canon, they were a stupid idea no matter WHAT excuse Smallville PTBs come up with for them, they're a worse deus ex machina in the literal sense of the phrase than even the poor ship was -- at least THAT had an EXCUSE for existing -- and they're not even a very good set; they look more like one of the producer's kids was given a ton of playdough and told to keep out of the way for a week), that blowing them up just once isn't satisfying enough. In fact, if anyone else wants to get in on the get-rid-of-the-caves-act, jump on board.

I'm just going to ASSUME that anyone who follows SV enough to read fanfic knows who Diana is...

Diana of Themyscira, sometimes called Paradise Island (some women would quibble that an island with no men on it could hardly be paradise, others would say the exact opposite) came visiting Smallville one day.

No particular reason. She wasn't on a quest. She wasn't being rebellious, since she was not, strictly speaking, either a teenager (though she pretty much looked and acted like one, given a rather restricted set of life experiences), or even a human-type being at all, having been made out of clay (long story there, and URLs don't belong in fanfic). She was just bored.

Let's face it, you have to be pretty bored to think of Smallville as a refreshing change of pace. (Unless you've been reading certain articles in the Torch, courtesy of its editor, which, although it has an online version, is not exactly hitting the top of the Google search list, even on Paradise Island.)

She knew about the meteor strike, of course. Anyone who had access to the mass media, even Fox or the Moonie Times, or conspiracy theorists on the internet, knew about the meteor strike. (The fact that the government had taken no action at all to clean up, study, or otherwise do anything about a major meteorite fall, was proof enough for some people that the government was, in fact, covering something up.)

If only they knew.

(Well, technically, the government(s) didn't know, either, but the people who keep getting caught with their pants down, literally as well as figuratively, are not the only game in town. Or country.)

She didn't know about Clark Kent, though. Themyscira had gotten satellite TV right along with the rest of the first-world nations, but Clark Kent wasn't much on the national or international news, not even the BBC.

So she wandered through Smallville, thinking about picking up some pieces of meteorite for her rock collection. (Paradise Island, being an island, was kind of short on rocks.)

And since there has to be a point to this story, or I could have left it at "the end" about five paragraphs ago, she promptly ran across a menacing meteor mutant. (Meteor mutant menace? Whatever. I think "freak of the week" has been copyrighted already.)

Let's make it a giant toad. I really hate it when some poor innocent cute kitty or loyal dog gets mutated and has to be killed. Sure, toads are innocent too, but they're also kind of icky, and people obviously don't mind them getting killed, even in junior high science class, although I dodged that particular grossness myself with the aid of PETA's simulation software. (See ... nope, no URLs in fanfics. The reader might get distracted and not bother to come back.)

So a giant toad, with a tongue about the length of a bus (do they have buses in Smallville? We're always seeing Clark get hit by one in Metropolis, but not even tourist buses seem to show up in Smallville), was rampaging -- well, not "rampaging," since toads don't do that, they just sort of sit and catch flies and sometimes hop, but when you're violating the cube-square law so ridiculously that a flying humanoid no longer seems like such a big deal, then the hopping and fly-catching can get kind of hazardous to the infrastructure -- was sitting and catching flies and occasionally hopping down Main Street.

(Just once, I want to see a town without a street named "Main") (hey, my computer just wrote "Mai" street, so maybe some city in Hawaii doesn't have a "Main" street).

Much to the discomfiture of the local business and building owners.

The toad wasn't after the buildings, of course, it was after the flies in the garbage dumpsters. That'll teach you to pay off the code inspectors instead of the garbage collectors! (You know, if every really rich person went on strike, no one would care, but let the garbage collectors or firefighters or nurses go on strike, and you'll figure out real quick who ought to be paid more.)

Diana was walking towards the smell of coffee (well, of course they have coffee on Paradise Island!) when she saw the giant toad crashing the building across the street. (The Talon, of course, would never do something so crass as to pay off the code inspectors. Lex isn't stupid, his failure to plant so much as one single listening device on the Kent farm just out of idle curiosity notwithstanding. Well, he lost that chance once Clark learned what "x-ray" meant, but he doesn't know that.)

Diana was already well aware that she was kind of on the abnormal side physically, and not just because she had D cups when she was technically only an hour old. She had watched the Olympics along with everyone else, and while (along with everyone else in Themysceria) she shook her head at what the mainlanders had allowed to happen to their glorious old buildings, she knew that the wimpiest girl in her class (the one who was always dissecting toads, in fact) could have tossed the javelin-thrower further than he had tossed the javelin.

So the giant toad didn't much faze her, although she had taken enough basic science classes to wonder why the damn thing didn't collapse under its own weight already, and whether whoever came up with these things had ever even HEARD of the cube-square law.

(It would prove a good thing, years down the line, that at least Bruce and Ray and Barry had actually made it through college chemistry and physics.)

Diana was less amazed by the toad, in fact, than she was by the building proprietor, or maybe janitor, standing in his doorway shaking a broom at the thing, or by the patrons of the coffee shop opposite, some of whom were standing interestedly at the window watching, coffee cups still in hand, and some of whom had gone back to reading their papers after identifying the source of the noise.

"What is WITH these people?" Diana said aloud to no one in particular, although Clark heard her, of course. "You'd think they see giant menacing toads every week!"

If only she knew.

Clark, in fact, was thinking the same thing, and resignedly eying all the people around him and wondering just how fast he would have to move in order to punch it out without being seen by a statistically significant proportion of the people in the town, or if he could maybe lure the toad out of town by waving a garbage dumpster in front of it and THEN punch it out.

It says a lot for the argument of nurture over nature that the descendant of a long line of world-class (and planet-destroying) scientists was thinking more like a farmer.

"Mom," he whispered to the woman who had not paused in her culinary activities after sparing a glance at the latest menace -- being a clean freak, she was pretty sure the toad would not be interested in anything in the Talon, except maybe the vanilla icing, so she was putting that away.

"Mom, do you think maybe you could -- create a distraction? Break some plates or something? So I can get out there while everyone is looking at you?"

Martha frowned. Right, make your mother the fall guy, er, gal, Clark. But they'd had that discussion before, so she tried something different. "It's green, Clark. Maybe you shouldn't go near it."

Clark rolled his eyes. "Mom, it's a TOAD. It's SUPPOSED to be green."

"FROGS are green," she lectured. "Except for some of the poisonous ones, which are red. Toads are usually more gray. In fact, some toads have the chameleon ability to blend in with ---"

**_"Mom..."_**

At any rate, he was spared having to sprain a brain cell when the toad turned its attention from the broom to Diana, who, although she didn't much look or smell like a fly, was another moving object, and therefore of interest to toad instincts. Before anyone except Clark could do more than gasp (and gasping at superspeed turned out to be really impractical), the toad shot out its tongue and latched onto Diana.

Who was shocked (and grossed out) just long enough for it to pull her within arm's reach. (Hers, not the toad's.)

Where she promptly buried her arm up to the shoulder through the front of its head, ending the rampage, er, the hopping and tongue flicking of the giant toad.

"EW!" Diana said with emphasis, having learned that word from the Cartoon Network -- something her 'mother' would really prefer that she not waste time on, but who was she to argue when she'd been caught reading a trashy novel about Greek god statues come to life at a women's garden party?

Diana shook her arm vigorously. "Anyone here have a bucket of water and some bleach?"

"Here's some wet-wipes," said a short blond who charged out of the coffee shop before the toad even finished collapsing. She dug in her shoulder bag with one hand, the other still balancing a large cup of coffee, and tried to hand them to Diana and offer her hand to shake at the same time, never relinquishing the coffee.

"Thanks, er..." Gods, even Ares wasn't that protective of his coffee. "I'm Diana."

"Chloe." She settled for handing off the wet-wipes and taking a gulp of coffee. "So, new in town? Much experience with giant toads? Were you following it, or just happened to be in the right place at the right time?"

"Who are you, Barbara Walters? No, sorry, she couldn't pronounce 'experience.' I'm just passing through, I guess. No, I've never seen a giant toad before. But I suspected that what would work on sharks would work on toads." Hm. Maybe she shouldn't have said that, from the way Chloe's eyes widened. Then again, what would a girl in the middle of farm country know about sharks? "Actually, I was just following the smell of coffee. Any chance of there being any left?"

"Are you kidding? The day we run out of coffee is the day I leave town. C'mon."

So it was that Diana found herself surrounded by Smallville's finest, which even did include a real live sheriff (who had gone to get her .50 cal when the toad first showed up, but seeing as everyone in town wanted to steal the thing, it had been securely locked away, and she'd had to stop to explain reality along the lines of "what part of 'your ass is mine' do you not understand?" to the deputy technically guarding the weapons locker, who was actually named Barney, but then, she had expected as much when she'd been transferred to Smallville). After a lecture about civilians interfering in police business, the sheriff had gone back to drinking coffee.

At least she wasn't a compulsive doughnut eater, Diana thought.

"And this is Clark, our resident do-gooder, who was the one I actually expected to see punching a giant toad in the face."

Diana looked over the resident do-gooder and decided that her mom could keep her trashy books about statues of Greek gods coming to life. She'd take a close approximation in the actual flesh any day.

"Pleased to meet you," she said, and she really hadn't intended for her voice to drop half an octave.

"Um, likewise," and Clark compensated for her when his squeaked.

"So, um, this sort of thing goes on a lot here...?"

Chloe waved a hand. "Smallville is like where they dumped all the old X-Files scripts that didn't get used. Last month it was glowing green ants."

A reminder Clark shuddered at from the pit of his stomach, because they had been carrying a LOT more load of the radioactive poison than the toad had -- his mom had been right, getting near the carcass made him queasy, and not just in an "oh, yuck" kind of way -- but the ants had sent fiery agony through his blood just to touch them, and he'd have returned the favor if there had been any energy left for his heat vision.

"Lex, he's our resident billionaire, he owns the fertilizer plant, came up with some cross between Amdro and the meteor rocks, but not before the southside subdivision got a couple of mounds that were the highest point in Kansas until it rained."

Diana was pretty sure her eyes were glazing over. Her mom had warned her that the outside world was more interesting than Paradise Island only in the sense of the old Chinese curse, but ... small towns with resident billionaires owning fertilizer plants?

"And then there's the kids who were here when the meteors hit -- you wanna see my Wall of Weird? Bet we've got California beat for offbeat any day. I dunno about New York City, though. They did host the Republican convention..."

"And then Clark could, you know, show her the caves," Pete suggested, with an unmistakable leer. Diana wasn't used to leers, but she knew about them. She'd watched a soap opera. Once.

"Sure. I'd like that." It wasn't, Diana told herself, as if there were anything in this small town that could hurt her, except maybe the sheriff's .50 cal. And Paradise Island was long overdue for some new story-telling.

The Wall of Weird did indeed prove worth the time, and Themyscira ended up adding entire volumes to its research library (of course they have a library on Paradise Island! A very nice one, in fact, having rescued what was left after the burning of Alexandria, which had caused shouting matches among the gods for mortal centuries. How could any place be paradise without a library?)

The caves, on the other hand, troubled her deeply. Clark's presence didn't bother her -- she doubted the kid could move so much as her little finger if it came to an arm-wrestling contest, gorgeous farmboy build or no -- but the look on his face when he traced over some of the paintings was thoroughly creepy.

In fact, there was a lot about the Greek-god-statue farmboy that was kind of creepy. He smelled wrong, for one thing, and not just the lingering presence of barn odeur. (Paradise Island had farm animals, too; a little manure had never bothered Diana.) And also his eyes were weird, changing colors at odd times (there were people with orange-ish eyes on Themyscira, but they were orange all the time, not blue one minute and hazel the next and the color of a burning log when he looked at -- well.)

And when he started talking about legends and destinies -- well, in her experience, that was the sort of things the gods were always yammering on about, and it never boded any good for anyone, even the gods, much less the mortals who got in the line of fire, literally or figuratively.

And when he started talking about burdens and secrets, she started wondering if the local chemical plant might be putting more in the water than just mutagenics.

And when he tried to give her a bracelet that would probably have been pretty valuable to a historian, mentioning some girl who had died (Diana smelled werewolf on it, and wondered if she had been one of the old clan or another local mutant), Diana declared it was past time she got back on the road, and let the farmboy mope through a speech about never forgetting her (hah, Diana thought, he'll have been through so many women within his first year away from his parents and the farm he won't remember my name five years from now) before giving him a goodbye kiss copied from what she'd seen on TV.

Well, she thought, maybe TV wasn't so bad, because that definitely counted towards changing her mind from those who thought Paradise Island was paradise without men to those in favor of importing a few select ones.

And he tasted a whole lot different from what she thought a farm boy was supposed to taste like -- in an interesting way, not weird the way the off-scent was -- though, not having any experience with aliens, except for the Martian Manhunter -- she chalked up the oddness to the fact that she had not, in fact, ever kissed a farm boy, or anyone else for that matter, before.

She decided to invite Chloe to Paradise Island sometime, but definitely not Lois, who looked at her as if she were a specimen to be studied, and besides that, looked sort of like her, the dark hair and sharp eyes and all, which was funny in that it made Clark act like he was balanced between two magnetic fields, though Diana didn't enjoy the feeling of being an object of contention, and decided to avoid any such complications in the future.

Those caves though... The whole business of legends and prophesies sounded dangerous as all Hades to her, and if she couldn't hang around to protect the residents from Chloe's next Wall of Weird subject (they'd been lucky not to get a plague of locusts, much less giant ones), she could at least get rid of the cause of that foreboding.

It took a whole night, though fortunately it wasn't all that suspicious to buy large amounts of supplies from the feed store in a farming community(especially since she had it delivered to the Kent farm, who, she had come to understand, were something of a hands-off subject in the town anyway, the weirdest salt-of-the-earth farmers in history, and what she didn't need, she left neatly stored in their storm cellar for them).

Okay, so the weird farmboy came by his weirdness honestly, she thought, but aside from the peculiar scent and the interesting taste and the build that Adonis was probably stewing over right now, they seemed like pretty nice ordinary people, doing their salt-of-the-earth best to keep up with the new millennium (the nonsensical western system of dating years was a subject of high amusement on Themyscira, except for the fact that they had bought computers on wholesale), so a little favor was nothing remarkable.

Besides, maybe it would make Clark feel a little better over the loss of his really unhealthy obsession with his questionable caves of destiny.

She also spent an hour raiding the high school chemistry lab (which had an amazing assortment of the kind of equipment required for the operation she intended -- amazing, decided the being from a near-mythical island, for a middle-of-nowhere school, as amazing as their biology lab having everything required for an in-depth hormone study instead of just a few frozen frogs and textbooks where the pages on evolution had been scribbled over -- technical competence and literacy were not at all what the satellite TV had led her to expect of Kansas. Maybe they had mixed up the countries or something).

She waited around to make sure nothing went wrong with her improvised suburban demolition, but she was well on her way across the state by the time Clark showed up to bemoan (long and sullenly, the moper) his tragic loss of a badly-programmed AI and its unfortunate access to unified field energies.

The explosion that brought dawn half an hour early was finally attributed to some Smallville-type hermit blowing up his car.

And those un-naturally haunted caves ceased to trouble Diana even in nightmares. (She never apologized to Clark, either, despite a shouting match years later that had the Bat triggering the emergency containment shields.)

But that bracelet gave her an idea...

The really good parts of this (and I know there are some, because I snickered at them) are due to LaCasta, http/ www. Fanfiction. Net / u / 167354 / . The crud is entirely mine, and like I said, even Clark probably shouldn't have eaten some of the things I found in the refrigerator.

You want the whole confusing story of Diana? It's worse than the retcon of Clark and Lex. http/ www .i nner-moppet .net / amazing / timeline. html

Hate the whole idea of cutting up frog guts? Yes, you really can do your biology homework on a computer instead of in the lab. (For a price, of course, unfortunately.)

http/ www. Peta. Org /mc / FactsheetDisplay .asp? ID92

Cube square law:

http/ www. Auburn. edu/ academic / classes/ zy/ 0301 / Topic4 / Topic4. html# square

"A human shrunk down to the size of a mouse would have limbs that the human could not move. They would be too heavy. Giants that stand 20 feet high would also be impossible."

But of course, a man can fly...


End file.
